Posts Tagged ‘placard’

Was this shot of Clement taken on a recent Saturday or a recent Sunday? Well, IDK, as the parking / double-parking / handicap placard free parking abusing looks pretty much the same to me:

This is despite the fact that Saturdays reflect implementation of the more market-rate SFPark approach but Sundays, well Sundays are ANYTHING GOES DAYS, due to our SFMTA board deciding that FREE SUNDAY PARKING was GOOD, and then DECIDING THE FREE SUNDAY PARKING was BAD, but then deciding that FREE SUNDAY PARKING was GOOD once again.

Myself, I’m not the kind to max out a parking meter and then lollygag about tending to bidness, as that (along with taxis, UBER, Lyft) is for non-cheap people, right?

Anyway, in part due to an extremely high amount of handicapped placards issued about town, the parking sitch looks pretty much the same from Saturday to Sunday.

If our SFMTA was really serious about increasing “parking availability” here, it’d jack up meter prices and then institute charging for parking on Sundays again. We’ll have to wait and see when that will happen.

I was on the edges of C-Town for a little while, on Sac above Grant so actually the traffic’s not too bad. Anyway, I (eventually) noticed that all the cars parked on the block (or my side of it, anyway) had handicapped placards AND that no Parking Control Officers were coming around. Could that be related?

I mean, if you have a quota, which you don’t, not officially, but actually you do, even these days, why would you waste your time where most of the rides are there all day and they’re not ticketable?

And here’s Geary on a Saturday, where they now have a bunch of meters installed.

Of course, no PCO’s came here when I was here – they seldom do, it seems.

Some of these placards are legit but MOST of them are not.

Of course, enforcement comes from making sure that the placards haven’t expired and from making sure the person belonging to the card has some relationship with the car being otherwise illegally parked, but not at all from people getting placards for the simple purpose of FREE PARKING all the live-long day.

The problem with this is that you make other people who similarly don’t need placards think they’re suckers for not joining the bandwagon. I mean, everybody has something wrong with them, right? That means that pretty much everybody can “qualify” for a placard in the State of Cali, pretty much.

You think these ppl were just parked, checking the Facebook? Nope, they were driving at about 20 MPH inbound on JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park. That’s why the hands are on the steering wheels and the phones are held up high.

Hey, do UBER drivers go about with handicap placards hanging from the rear view? Yes, some do.

Anyway, here’s the PCO again. How much time pressure is this person under if she’s fiddling with her ticketing assistance device whilst driving?

What’s that, SFMTA – you don’t have quotas, but your employees act as if they do? Sure seems that way…

Anywho, what do we see here – do we see the three parked cars of the occupants of one unit of housing all carousing about license plate-free on the Streets of San Francisco?

I think so.

Are these people pulling a Steve Jobs? Are they driving registered vehicles hither and yon with one or two DMV plates in the trunk, you know, waiting to get pulled over by the popo and then it will be, what, “Oh, I’ve been meaning to put those things on my car. The dealership says I need a special bracket, or something” or something like that?

I’ll tell you, the reason why the owners of Italian exoticars drive about California without proper California registration and insurance is because of the crushing “use taxes” they would have to pay otherwise. So your expensive, impractical weekend car might cost you $10K or $20K just for CA registration for the first year and then many thousands per year for years after that. So you end up seeing people using Oregon plates or Nevada plates or Montana plates or whatever.

But OTOH, the reason why owners of German luxocars don’t have the plates what DMV sent them mounted front and rear, just speculating here, are:

Eurocars aren’t made with tall square-ish American license plates in mind, so you might need a special bracket to mount them, and even though dealers are obligated to provide them…

After they break, due to their Mickey Mouse construction, drivers don’t want to replace them due to…

Car owners thinking that ugly U.S.-style plates mar the good looks of their Euro rides, and…

4. Bridge Toll Evasion

(Hey, what if you have just the back license plate on your car – do the Golden Gate Bridge people take images of you car from the back as well? IDK.)

Anyway, the best example of this would be a German car owner who improperly asked for a handicapped placard and was improperly given one by a chiropractor and then uses that placard to park for free all day long at an SFMTA parking meter in Frisco, say someplace close to the Financh but not too close, maybe by that Safeway on Washington BUT ALSO doesn’t have license plates mounted in order to evade the $6.50 daily Golden Gate Bridge toll BUT ALSO has an insidery CHP 11-99 Foundation license plate holder so that the CHP officer who pulls you over already knows that you’ve personally given thousands of dollars to the families of CHP officers so s/he will go easy on you “this time” for speeding on the 101 without license plates BUT ALSO has been doing this for years and years.

It wasn’t that I didn’t tryIt’s not the kind of thing, that you buyWritten in my destinyLife is but a dreamCovered by the skyStop saying that you’re calling timeLook at your life before you start on mineI’m not the kind of person that you needI’m sick of tryingI mean that it’s over

It was always specialIt was like water down the drainI’m intoxicatedEvery time I hear your nameI try to rememberBut nothing is the sameIt was always specialit was like water down the drain

Patiently you wait for meYou’re so blindI thought it couldn’t beThen changed my mindDrowning in the endless seaLine all those linesThe traces of your memoryDon’t belong with mine

Moving on, to this. Some deets on the PCO here and now onto the Uber driver. Uh, what’s he doing? Is he holding a phone up high so his eyes can easily switch back and forth from his device and The Road Ahead? IDK. And hey, what would be a nicer gift for an Uber Lyft driver than a handicapped placard? I’ve never seen this. Gee, I bet that really cuts down on the parking hassles one might have Ubering about Frisco.

So “Safer” Market Street is going to ban “private vehicles” including Lyft and Uber-type vehicles, but does that include rides with properly-displayed handicapped placards?

IDK. It seems our SFMTA doesn’t want to deal with this issue.

(Actually, it seems our SFMTA deals with embarrassing issues discussed on the SFMTA website by simply deleting webpages/URLs as soon as members of The Public link to them. Boy, it sure seems that way lately. But moving on, moving “forward” as they say.)

Oh look info about the SFMTA not located at the official SFMTA site – so here’s a link I cite without worrying that it will go bad within 24 hours:

• Bob Planthold: Taxi drivers say they can travel where Muni goes as stated by City Charter. The City will need investigate this. Also broader phrasing is needed regarding disability because “Red & Blue Placards” cannot be restricted.

Read the whole thing, if you want. It’s about all the plans the SFMTA has for this area.

So, is the SFMTA going to ban drivers of private vehicles with handicapped placards from turning onto Market at most places between 3rd and 8th?

(If you want to see scenes like this, head to Washington and Davis, just north of the Financh. And for some reason, handicap placard users tend to have brand new cars, and a lot of them have Mercedes-Benz S-Classes…)

Hey, here’s another question:

What percentage of California physicians have ever been disciplined for signing off on somebody’s handicap placard application?

The answer is zero percent (0%), in the entire history of Cali.

So that’s why it’s preferable for doctors to just sign your form instead of explaining why s/he doesn’t want to sign your form and, and, you know, piss you off.

You know, I’m in my 40’s, but when I was in my 30’s, my knees felt warm for a couple days. I looked it up and thought, oh so that’s what bursitis is. And people were all no you don’t have bursitis, that’s what plumbers get. And I thought, no, plumbers get chronic bursitis and I got me some acute bursitis. So I took an ibu pill and that was that – I never had this symptom again. Now, Gentle Reader, do you think I could go to a doctor, or a non-doctor, cause the DMV takes the word of pretty much anyone, and say I want a handicap placard for my bursitis condition, and then get a handicap placard, and then park all day all day, for free? I bet I could.

As up in Portland, OR. Hey, you know Portland is a leader in so many things, so guess what they just did up there? That’s right, NO SOUP FOR YOU! And, all of a sudden, most of the handicapped placards went away.

IMO, this DMV “operation” misses the point, ’cause the bigger crime is all the drivers of those new Mercedes-Benzeses parking for free in or near the Financial ALL DAY LONG.

We have a corrupt system in which you can simply ask your doctor(!) for free parking.

But anyway:

DMV Investigators Make Major Disabled Placard Application Bust

Operation Blue Zone Catches Three Fraudulent Placard Applicants

SACRAMENTO — The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) announced today the arrest of three suspects in connection with illegal activity associated with the Disabled Person Placard (DPP) application process. On Saturday, July 12, 2014, Qiaoyun Chen, 50 years old, and Guobin Qin, 29 years old, were arrested at their homes in San Francisco. The San Francisco District Attorney’s office charged the suspects with four felonies including filing false information with a state agency, perjury, commercial burglary, and forgery. The third suspect, Yessi Morales, 35 years old from San Francisco, was arrested on July 3, 2014 during a traffic stop by the San Francisco Police Department, she is charged with 24 felony counts.

“The DMV is stepping up Disabled Placard enforcement in a different, more aggressive way by catching the perpetrators at the beginning stages,” said DMV Director Jean Shiomoto. “Operation Blue Zone has been very successful in catching fraud placard applications in the Bay Area.”

The San Francisco District DMV Investigations Office started the Operation Blue Zone (OBZ) investigation in February 2014 after receiving a large number of DPP applications that were flagged by DMV field office staff as being allegedly fraudulent. Flag triggers included suspected forged doctor’s signatures, similar applicant and doctor hand-writing, frequent applications being submitted by the same doctor, and suspected false medical diagnosis. These alleged fraud applications began increasing in numbers in late 2013 and the beginning of 2014, with the majority of the placard recipients living or working in San Francisco. The suspected fraud applications were submitted in several DMV field offices with the majority submitted to the San Mateo DMV field office.

“The crimes related to submitting a fraudulent application as opposed to catching someone on the street misusing a DPP for parking is quite different,” said DMV Supervising Investigator Calvin Woo. “Parking misuse violations are typically local ordinance infractions or vehicle code misdemeanors where the abuser ends up with a hefty fine. Fraud DPP application violations are felonies.”

All three suspects could face up to four years in prison. Morales has been freed on $60,000 bail, and Qin and Chen were released after posting $30,000 bail apiece.

If you believe that someone has been issued a Disabled Person Placard in error or suspect placard misuse, we urge you to contact your local DMV Investigations office and submit a written complaint. The complaint can be anonymous. Please be aware that some qualifying disabilities are not visually apparent and allegations of misuse may be unfounded. The department considers crimes relating to disabled placards very serious and every complaint of this nature will be reviewed. Complaint forms can be found on the DMV public website www.dmv.ca.gov under the search key words “Record of Complaint,” or under form INV172A – Record of Complaint form. You may also obtain a complaint form from your local DMV field office.

Save Time, Go Online! Doing business with the DMV has never been easier. The DMV offers an array of services to customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through its Website including online advance appointments for written and drive tests; vehicle registration and driver license renewals, selection of personalized license plates, changes of address and payment of fees via secure debit transactions. Customers can also effect transactions by calling DMV customer service at (800) 777–0133. DMV is a department under the California State Transportation Agency (CalSTA).

Hey look, here’s seven in a row, as recently seen on the streets of San Francisco:

Click to expand

All right, here’s what NOT to do:

Borrow Nana’s handicapped-placarded Crown Vic to drive to a Giants game to park for free close to the ballpark, like you’re a rock star.

NO NO NO! ‘Cause if you do that, somebody will stake out your nana’s car just waiting for you to return. And then it’ll be, “Where’s your nana, where’s your nana?” And then you’ll get a ticket or two, worth a grand or two.

What you need to do is a little doctor shopping. It’s not too hard to find a CA doc to sign your DMV form because NO DOCTOR IN THE HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA HAS EVER GOTTEN IN TROUBLE FOR SIGNING ONE OF THESE DMV FORMS.

But even if you don’t know a doctor, that’s OK because you can have a chiropractor or a nurse or a physician assistant or a midwife sign the form as an alternative.

Now, what handicap should you claim? Well, everybody has something, right? Alls I know is that most handicapped placards used for parking on the streets of San Francisco are being used as a free parking scam. So therefore, lots of people have lies on their DMV forms.

Once you get your “legal” placard, that’s it – nobody in SF will question it.

Of course, you can’t “pull a CW Nevius” by parking in the towaway lane during rush hour, oh no – you’ll get towed. But you will be able to park for free all day all day at meters just like the tens and thousands of others.